Stories by: Patrick Thibodeau

In filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, companies that use H-1B and L-1 visas are alerting investors that it may become more difficult to obtain them in the future. Some firms are also noting that they don't know whether President-elect Barack Obama and the new Congress will help them get adequate numbers of visas.

Hewlett-Packard has a deal for you: zero-percent financing for up to 36 months on leases of many of its enterprise software products. The offer, announced last week, applies to software contracts worth more than US$100,000 and will be in place through January 31.

Forrester Research is now forecasting an IT spending growth rate of just 1.6 per cent in the U.S. next year, down from its earlier projection of a 6.1 per cent increase. But the market research and consulting firm thinks a turnaround will begin by the summer.

Online job listings for technology workers are down sharply, but there are still plenty of openings for people with the right skills, or for those living in the right metropolitan area.

In stark and certain terms, a Congress-mandated commission Tuesday warned that the world's nations face the threat of a major terrorism attack using biological and nuclear weapons by 2013. The commission's report, titled "The World at Risk," skips over the threat of cyberattacks and focuses almost exclusively on nuclear and biological weapons.

If the definition of a personal supercomputer is that it is inexpensive, can sit on a desk and is at least within shouting distance of the Top500 systems list, new machines equipped with Nvidia's Tesla graphics processor are among the first in that category.

President-elect Barack Obama will soon outline an economic stimulus plan that likely will include billions of dollars for infrastructure projects, such as roads, bridges and new schools. Obama also is hearing calls for new funding to improve the information infrastructure and the virtual highways it runs on, and to broaden access to high-performance computing (HPC) systems.

A U.S. government intelligence agency thinks robots may be so capable by 2025 that questions such as "Would you like fries with that?" may be uttered by a smiling machine at the order counter.

The economic downturn that has resulted in tens of thousands of layoffs in the housing and financial services sectors is now bearing down on the tech industry. The job cuts announced by Sun Microsystems on Friday are only the latest in the growing toll.

Sun Microsystems is slashing its workforce on a scale typically reserved for automakers, announcing Friday that it plans to lay off up to 6,000 employees -- a restructuring that comes on top of earlier cutbacks made over the past year.

The auto industry has been offering US lawmakers an apocalypse-level scenario warning them that as many as three million jobs could disappear if automakers run out of cash.